Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 by Zoe Kinsley (review)

241 riod’’; indeed, the Civil War and the Restoration opened up the literary field to them. Chapter 5 explores the surge in women’s writing that emerged out of movements inspired by the English Civil War. Writing by Quakers or charismatics (Anna Trapnel) illustrates how religious discourse authorized women’s writing and challenged gender conventions . Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthologies of women’s writing were shaped by their depiction of women as legitimate or illegitimate, reputable or disreputable, genteel or brazen. Communities of Restoration and eighteenthcentury writers influenced literary collections , which, in turn, served as an important intellectual inheritance for later readers and writers. Of particular interest to eighteenth century scholars is the closing chapter on Philips and Behn, in which Mr. Salzman thoroughly and engagingly traces their literary output and the critical responses to their work, with attention to recent criticism. He addresses Behn in the context of Restoration writers, (sexual) politics, and the travails of professional and literary selffashioning . Here Mr. Salzman’s scholarly apparatus especially succeeds because Behn is a chameleon. The book includes an extensive Bibliography of primary (manuscript and printed) and secondary sources (commentary and critical ). Sharon Harrow Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania ZOE KINSLEY. Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 216. $99.95. Despite the growing scholarship on British travel abroad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, little has been written on domestic British tourism. Yet ‘‘home tour texts,’’ Ms. Kinsley argues, are central to our understanding of travel and of Britons’ sense of national identity . She examines the writings of such women as Celia Fiennes (whose tours mark the starting date of the period under consideration), Anne Grant, Elizabeth Isabella Spence, Mary Morgan, Elizabeth Giffard, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Cobbold, Sarah Murray, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Ellen Weeton. Women making the home tour often commented that travel within Britain could help develop national patriotism . Yet they were also conscious of the ‘‘otherness’’ of many of their fellow Britons and drew on the same rhetoric and motifs used by travelers abroad in order to express that ‘‘foreignness.’’ Travelers often used language referring to Arcadian paradises or primitive savagery , or made comparisons to locations on the Continent to describe unfamiliar British people or places. People were understood as ‘‘foreign’’ primarily because of their different mode of existence . Class was the ‘‘most significant determiner of the way in which regional and national difference is articulated in home tour writing.’’ Rather than assert a necessary difference between travel accounts written by women and men, Ms. Kinsley’s objective is to consider the ways gender intersected with other concerns . The first of the three parts considers the physical formatting of the travelogue as a text. To translate one’s subjective experience into a more objective, general truth, one borrowed patterns from guidebooks or from the cartographic tradition , maps being symbols of veracity. By using itineraries and framing descriptions with contents pages, indexes, 242 and appendices, women authenticated their personal travel experiences. Ms. Kinsley usefully examines manuscript travel accounts in the context of current scholarship on scribal culture. Manuscripts were not unprofessional. They were not always private, nor did they imply a marginalization of women’s writing. Rather, manuscript travel texts demonstrate careful attention to textual production and awareness of one’s readers . The second section assesses the ways in which women engaged with the primarily masculine aesthetics of landscape , particularly the picturesque. While women used the framing discourse to give expression to their experiences , they were also likely to break the frame to acquire a more detailed , subjective, and emotional relationship with place. Some women broke the frames of female identity and imagined an alternative sense of self. Part Three analyzes the ways in which eighteenth-century home tour travelers experienced and understood those areas they considered sites of difference , mainly Wales and the Scottish Highlands. Applying theories of modern tourism by Dean McCannell and John Urry, Ms. Kinsley finds that eighteenthcentury travelers, like their later counterparts , sought both Britain’s rural past and its modern progress. By marking some areas of Great Britain as ‘‘other,’’ travelers transformed their domestic journeys into ‘‘foreign’’ travels. Well grounded, Women Writing the Home Tour contributes to travel and...